Adam Cameron posted a code challenge on his blog this last Friday. I have provided my answer in the form of a Google Go project. For those interested a 10,000ft view of how this works can be found below. Here are the instructions he provided.

For a given array and a given threshold, return the subarray which contains the longest run of consecutive numbers which - in total - are equal-to or less than the threshold.

• The main program is a console application that accepts two arguments:
  • input - A comma-delimited list of integer numbers
  • threshold - The total value an array sequence may not exceed
• A Scheduler component (probably a bad name) starts slicing the input integer array into sub-sequences
• Each sub-sequence is summed in a goroutine
• The sub-sequence is totaled, and both the sub-sequence and total are put into a structure that is written to a channel
• Another goroutine listens for writes to this channel and stuffs the structures into a result array
• The result array is traversed to determine which sub-sequence is longest.
  • If there is a tie for longest the sub-sequence with the greatest total sum value is chosen

I chose to make the slicing and summing activity multi-process mostly for the fun of the exercise. Though in theory one could provide a very large set of integers and it would process rather quickly I suspect. Either way this was a fun exercise. You should certainly go check out the blog post and see other people’s submissions. There are entries in language including Clojure, CFML, PHP and JavaScript.